Thursday, November 22, 2012

Since their startling discovery in Peru’s coastal
area during the 1920s, mystery still surrounds the so-called Nazca lines,
depicting several massive images decipherable only from high altitudes.

The vast majority of the lines date from 200 BC to
500 AD, to a time when a people referred to as the Nazca inhabited the region.
The earliest lines, created with piled up stones, date as far back as 500 BC.

According to LiveScience.com:

The purpose of the lines continues to elude
researchers and remains a matter of conjecture. Ancient Nazca culture was
prehistoric, which means they left no written records.

One idea is that they are linked to the heavens with
some of the lines representing constellations in the night sky. Another idea is
that the lines play a role in pilgrimage, with one walking across them to reach
a sacred place such as Cahuachi and its adobe pyramids.

Yet another idea is
that the lines are connected with water, something vital to life yet hard to
get in the desert, and may have played a part in water-based rituals.

In the absence of a firm archaeological conclusion a
number of fringe theories have popped up, especially several aligned with
“ancient astronaut” theories. A less radical suggestion is that the Nazca
people used balloons to observe the lines from high altitudes, something for which
there still is no archaeological evidence.

Friday, November 2, 2012

Evidence that some Stone Age cultures may have
considered dead young men to be threatening to living people could be the
reason groups of newly discovered skulls were buried with smashed-in faces.

The 10,000-year-old skulls were found in Syria. They appear
to have been dug up several years after being buried with their bodies,
separated, then reburied. No one knows why Neolithic societies buried clusters
of skulls - often near or underneath settlements.

Like those found in other caches, they have been
cleanly separated from their spines, suggesting they were collected from dead
bodies that had already begun to decompose. Patterns on the bone indicate that
some had been decomposing for longer than others, making it likely that they
were all gathered together for a specific purpose.

Most of the skulls belonged to adult males between 18
and 30 years old.

Tides represent the high and low, the ebb and flow. They're the rhythm spanning millennia and an apt image for this blog as it seeks to provide accounts linking today with ages long past. New archaeological finds and scholarly speculations help us better understand our ancestors and this small planet we've shared. And the better we understand our forebears and their environs, the better we know ourselves.

A Top History Site

Ancient Tidesis in the Top 5 favorite ancient-history blogs at Baidun Galleries, one of the world's leading dealers in rare and exquisite antiquities, located in Jerusalem. A Baidun spokesman said Ancient Tides is among "a few reputable bloggers pertaining to ancient history that we thought deserved a shout out."

Ancient Tides is the top blog in the Ancient History category at Masters in History, a portal for online degrees in History.

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Ancient Tides has been called one of the top ancient history blogs by Ace Online Schools, a guide to schools, degrees and other educational programs.

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Ancient Tides is listed among the "Top 100 History Blogs" by Guide to Online Schools, a portal to various online education programs.